Matthew’s Gospel loves pyrotechnics to make a point. The author saves the best fireworks for the grand finale:

"Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

Pyrotechnics are great on July 4, or a Pink Floyd concert, monster truck rally, or Texas barbeque. But we should use them sparingly in our religious observations. Shooting flames aren’t the best enhancement of our view of God. The fire of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost works, but otherwise just stick to candlelight and campfires. A little flame goes a long way. Christianity has overdone hellfire. In the early Renaissance, an Italian town was nowhere unless your cathedral had a scary "Last Judgement" scene. The Duomo in Florence is full of dramatic, leaping flames and devils. It's like going to church in a massive, haunted house. If that was your place of worship, you might think Jesus talked about fiery hells as his central message. But John's Gospel and the letters of Paul never use the symbol of flames and Hell. Even Augustine, who first wrote about original sin, said that we should not be Christian because we fear the flames of Hell but because the love of God draws us in.

Once again, it's Matthew's Gospel that favors the pyrotechnics. It makes me wonder about his background. The Gospel was written about ten years after the destruction of Jerusalem, and I wonder what Matthew saw of the death, devastation, and flames. Most of the Renaissance frescoes of the Last Judgement were painted in the aftermath of the Black Plague, which killed off over 1/3 of Europe’s population. We need to take a trauma-informed view of our religious symbols. How much is this imagery of Hell was influenced by living through earthly death and destruction?

The main point of the sheep and goats parable is in alignment with the wisdom tradition of the Old Testament. If you live well and do the right thing, we will all prosper together. If you live only for yourself and harm others, it's going to get ugly. Psalm 1:3-4 says,

(The righteous) are like trees
    planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
    and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.

⁴ The wicked are not so
    but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

This message is straightforward: be righteous, not wicked. Be a sheep and not a goat.

Jesus original audience would have recognized the Old Testament imagery of God being the good shepherd. In Psalm 23, the shepherd feeds the sheep in green pastures, waters them from the still waters, protects them from enemies, and even in the valley of the shadow of death, we will fear no evil. The parable is deeply influenced by the prophetic voice of Ezekiel 34, which denounces the leaders of Israel for being poor shepherds:

Woe, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves!...³ You eat the fat; you clothe yourselves with the wool…but you do not feed the sheep. ⁴ You have not strengthened the weak; you have not healed the sick; you have not bound up the injured; you have not brought back the strays; …but with force and harshness, you have ruled them.

God will act as a good shepherd:

¹² As shepherds sort out their flocks when they are among scattered sheep,^[a] so I will sort out my sheep.

¹⁵ I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. ¹⁶ I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strays, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.

You can see how Jesus's parable of the sheep and goats builds from the words of Ezekiel.

The sheep and goats parable makes its point by repetition. It tells us the list of the five things we are supposed to do and repeats the list four times. First, Jesus tells the sheep you fed me when I was hungry, gave me water when I was thirsty, clothed me, welcomed me as a stranger, visited me when I was sick or in prison. The sheep repeat the list, then Jesus gives the goats the same list, and the goats repeat it. By the end we all have it memorized, which may be the point. When I wrote news copy as a radio journalist, my editors would have said I don't have to repeat the list all four times. But maybe we do. People need to hear things seven times to act. 

Imagine you are one of the good sheep who have found yourself in the green pasture; Jesus says you are inheriting the Kingdom because you have fed, watered, clothed, welcomed, and visited him. That's nice, but being such a good person, you must be honest and say, "Excuse me, Jesus, I don't want to butt in line here, but I don't remember doing any of this for you?" You're honest, right? If you see a $20 bill on the ground, you ask the person in front of you if they dropped it. You tell that friendly grocery store clerk they gave you too much change. So, you are not going to steal someone else's heavenly reward. That would be cheating!

Jesus says, "When you served the least, that was me. You saw me in the breadline."

Over on the other pasture, the one scorched by drought and climate change, the goat hears that he didn't feed, cloth, welcome, and visit Jesus. "Wait a minute! I never saw you before. I would have fed you, but I didn't realize you looked so Palestinian. I thought you were more like a blond-haired surfer dude. If I had known it was you, the check would have been in the mail. And Jesus said, "When you did not serve the least, you did not serve me." 

The inability to see Jesus in another person feels essential to this parable's meaning. Another way of saying this is, "You did not see the inherent worth and dignity of someone vulnerable and in need."

Writer Aldous Huxley said, "The purpose of propaganda is to make one set of people forget that another set of people are human." In every war, the enemy is made into a wild beast, an infidel, or someone nefarious. Nazi’s labeled Jews as vermin and parasites. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutus justified slaughtering Tutsis, calling them cockroaches. We saw the Soviets as godless Communists and they saw us as rapacious capitalists and warmongers, so we could point nuclear missiles at each other. If you can label people as inherently villainous and threatening, you can kill them in the name of God.

Stigmatizing the vulnerable is becoming common political rhetoric. I understand if you have tuned out the mean-spiritedness of our politics. I take in the news at a dose that doesn't overwhelm me. But pay attention to the intensified dehumanizing rhetoric. In recent rallies, the ex-president called immigrants vermin who will dilute our bloodlines. He wants to jail political opponents and casually implies a general should be executed for disagreeing with him. "I am your vengeance,” he proclaimed. He needs to read Deuteronomy 32:35, "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord," meaning only God has this authority. (In truth, I don't trust a god who demands vengeance either.). 

Tolerating powerful disagreements and dissent makes America great. Tolerating labels that dehumanize others makes us weak. The energy of America draws on the best of our diversity. 

In calling out Trump's behavior, I don't want to stigmatize people who support him. We have family who agree with him. While I strongly disagree, I challenge myself to do so respectfully. I could be right, but I still get my attitude wrong. The hardest thing Jesus said was, "Love your enemies." 

The good sheep in the parable did the right thing but did not realize they did it to Jesus. Is this a caution not only to do the right thing but also to recognize another person's inherent worth and dignity? You can feed hungry people but still fail to offer dignity. When I worked in a homeless shelter, someone called and offered to make a Thanksgiving meal. I told them we had more than enough planned, but we needed volunteers 365 days a year. The person was angry at me because they wanted to make a Thanksgiving meal to teach their children how lucky they were, and they didn't have time during the rest of the year. 

In Matthew, this is Jesus' last teaching before his arrest. Make your service personal. Serve others like it is me because it is me. If we take Genesis 1 seriously, we believe that everyone contains some of the image and likeness of God. So, we look for that spark of divinity in everyone. If you look at someone as worthy of love, you will treat them well. If you look at them trying to decide if they are sheep or goats, if they are in or out, you might miss Christ standing hungry before you.